… he isn’t a writer to go to for three-dimensional depictions of reality. His characters tend to be variations on a limited number of figures: a passive yet stubbornly resourceful male protagonist; a wife with an unguessed-at hinterland; a kooky, flirtatious, sexually unavailable girl; a mysterious, confident, sexually available older woman; a creepy, slick professional man and so on.

Some people say there are good times and bad times, but I don’t know and I don’t care. Nobody really knows which time is good and which one is bad. What we writers have to do is just observe and recognize what is happening.

Tanizaki has written that the Japanese language is completely different from English or other Western languages, that it is special and in some ways superior to Western languages…Tanizaki is a very brilliant novelist and a great man, but I don’t agree with him, because there is no superiority of one language to other languages. It’s just not true.